When I was a child, band websites and fan clubs were so important. I discovered Kong Studios (Demon Days era) and was determined to explore every crevice. I was freaked out when I found the closet where Shaun Ryder’s head was struggling to survive. (I don’t think I ever found enough nutrients to feed him and instead reflected on the interaction as a meditation on life as a constant struggle.) Probably around the same age, I signed up for The Victims, The Killers’ fan club, and was obsessed with every stupid reference scattered across the forum. (So many users going by a variation of “Mrs. Brightside.”) Back in the early 2000s, any site change or update or newsletter provided a huge dopamine hit—was I the first to discover this news? I can’t wait, I should put their last album back in rotation! Is a tour coming? Then ONLY their music in the car!1
I can therefore understand the mind of a stan. True fandom can be paradoxical: hear news from artist, consume their old art, consume their new art upon release, begin discourse about the relative excellence of all their art, then slowly forget about artist when there is no news.2 The first time I felt disillusioned by the easter-egg-laden-website marketing ploy was the Atoms for Peace album site. It featured a sprawling work of art in the same vein of Amok’s album cover and if you scrolled to the right, there was a button that would supposedly allow you to download a hidden track, “What the Eyeballs Did.” I can’t remember if I couldn’t find the button or if the download had been disabled by the time I visited the site, but either way, it stayed hidden. This was the one point of interaction of the site, and I didn’t get to do it. I’m not bitter at all. I see it more as an indication that fan interactions were becoming less exclusive and generally less special for the diehards. Amok came four years after Radiohead offered In Rainbows to fans for pay-what-you-want, and the world of music marketing had shifted. In the early 2000s social media hadn’t cheapened the relationship between artist and fan. But a decade later I began to notice the loose stones that indicated the erosion of that relationship.
That’s where stan culture comes in to fill a void. Those social media accounts dedicated to celebrities—where they may post photos, videos, news or what-have-you about that one particular celebrity—can’t necessarily replicate the personal relationship a fan may have with their fave, but they do replace the dopamine rush with notifications. Up to once an hour. On all platforms. In all seriousness, it is probably a better solution to leave it to the fan community than, say, having an internationally famous band like The Killers produce member benefits and include an iconic behind-the-scenes ditty as a bonus track easter egg on their compilation record. Hard to do that every album cycle.
These stan accounts are growing more powerful than ever as the landscape turns to prioritizing engagement. The cycle of fan discourse continues ad nauseum with simple prompts on text-based platforms like Twitter and Threads. Some of the behavior is predatory, bordering on ragebait, like when Eric Alper posts something like, “What’s a song that has an absurd amount of emotion in it?” Um, all of them? Then there are the more genuine attempts at connection beyond click farming, like from news outlets like @mitskileaks, who in particular filled a need that Mitski herself created on socials when she went dark. There are also accounts that may not fill a void but still have their place in engaging with like-minded fans, such as @ArianaToday.
In the first week of December 2025, the Ariana Grande Today fan account on Twitter posted a bracket of 128 songs competing in a March Madness-like contest. The engagement is modest—higher than anything I have ever achieved but not completely viral. I saw plenty of reactions on my timeline, call me an Arianator if you must. As if I needed more Ariana in my life. I saw Wicked: For Good on opening night, I’ve been listening to the soundtrack of the first film all year. I still go back to eternal sunshine every few months. And you know what. I was more than willing to participate in this bracket.
Unlike most brackets, a poll based on Twitter is inherently influenced by those placing their bets. Theoretically that could mean more close matches and/or severely wide margins. When provided the opportunity, I would also prefer to retain the right to continue betting even if everyone I voted for in round one has been eliminated. Not that I did that poorly in my bracket, but it’s a nice perk. Additionally I reserve the right to change my allegiance toward any song depending on its new opponent. Is this what the stock market is? (I did also do a complete bracket for comparison, don’t worry.)
I didn’t actually listen to every single pairing during my, uh, research. My favorite songs stuck out, making the opponent irrelevant, so I cut a few minutes off the exercise each time by simply having a strong opinion. But I must have listened to about 100 songs on that first night. I began my career as a fan of Ariana Grande with 2018’s Sweetener and wasn’t too familiar with anything that came before that wasn’t an international superhit. I have been known to gravitate toward songs with more careful production, which is admittedly somewhat a recency bias. Throughout this process I gained more of an appreciation for her early electro-ballad phase and especially her debut.
Among the songs seeded in this year’s bracket, I crunched a few numbers. 42 (32.8%) are promotional singles, 33 (25.8%) are ballads, and 12 (9.4%) include whistle tones. For reasons to be discussed later, I also tracked the songs featuring people of color, and kept a subcategory specifically for all of the collabs with The Weeknd. I’m sure there are other categories I could have explored, but these stuck out as notable characteristics as I waded through the real-time chitter from participants.
This contest, while not viral in numbers, is apparently a mainstay of the Twitter Arianator experience. I learned that the account has hosted a bracket since 2015, and many voters are repeat offenders. Last year’s winner was “We Can’t Be Friends” from her album released that year, Eternal Sunshine. “God is a Woman” has won the most (thrice!) and “No Tears Left to Cry” won twice at interesting times in Ariana Grande’s career (2020 and 2023, shrug emoji).
One may assume a hardcore allegiance to the 2018 album given how many times a Sweetener track took home the trophy. But what became clear very early on is that the fanbase, like any community, is not monolithic. The one thing that connects everyone is a love for the music of a five-foot-tall entertainer, but with a catalog of over 200 songs, there’s a wide range of answers to why someone is a fan of Ariana Grande. I observed the Twitter subset of fans, which is already a huge asterisk on this as a scientific study, but it is a statistical sample of Arianators nonetheless.
I don’t think any of the bracket participants thought so deeply about their own fandom but it’s true that some fans drew lines in the sand. “Some of you are not real Arianators,” one fan claimed during the faceoff between “Sometimes” and “Imagine.” I assume negative feelings came from those on the losing side, and that would make this person a bigger fan of “Sometimes” from Dangerous Woman. Maybe it made them happy that “Imagine” got eliminated in the next round. “Ariana I’m so sorry your fans don’t know real music…” another fan lamented over “Just a Little Bit of Your Heart”’s defeat at the hands of “Bad Idea.” Not only is this a catty way to grieve, but it also distances them from Arianators. If they like “Bad Idea” more than “JALBOYH,” then I cannot be associated.
No fandom is free from what Ari stans refer to as locals and newgens. I think of locals as the passersby in a conversation they don’t belong in. The term is usually lobbed as an insult and probably not meant literally but Twitter is a dangerous territory; it is entirely possible that a user who hates Ariana Grande came across one of @ArianaToday’s polls and wanted to throw a wrench in it. More likely this group is made up of folks who are neutral on Ari making decisions that irritate long-time fans with their calcified opinions. “before you vote you must have over 5k minutes of ariana streaming this year AND she must be in at least 3 of your past spotify wrapped before you can even think about voting bc these results are egregious,” said a fan, whose username is a strawberry emoji.
Perceived as antagonists, newgens are exactly what they sound like: recent fans, or the new generation of the fandom. There is an implied recency bias with newgens, as if they refuse to listen to Ariana’s back catalog. This is not a new label for stans on the internet but, in this scenario, it does apply specifically to Eternal Sunshine voters. The conversation began last year when “We Can’t Be Friends” won the same year of its release, the first track to do so since “God Is a Woman” won in 2018 immediately after the release of Sweetener. The annual winners suggest that fans completely ignored Positions and only chose to recognize the greatness of Thank U, Next in 2021, an otherwise quiet year for Ari. She was busy marrying Dalton Gomez and whatnot.
And finally, there are the hardcore factions that reveal themselves over the duration of the bracket. The “Past Life” hive proved to be so strong that they sent their song to the Finals. The track is only about eight months old, part of the Eternal Sunshine deluxe edition release, and the streams—as many opponents loved to point out—were especially low. The track is (as of this writing) Grande’s 129th most played on Spotify and 187th most played on YouTube with slightly more than 10M plays on the lyric visualizer, which is the only video for that song being tracked. A fair comparison would be “Twilight Zone,” another cut from the deluxe Eternal Sunshine. It is currently Grande’s 59th most played on Spotify and full recordings of the track occupy three spots on her YouTube for a total of 61M spins. “Past Life” was the underdog by a mile and the fans made sure it was not forgotten.
The most mosts happened in the first round. Of the 64 head-to-heads, I personally guessed 39 correctly (61%), but not everyone walked away happy. A lot less energy was spent celebrating a song’s victory than its defeat, but perhaps the act of complaining tuckered everyone out. Across the entire contest, the most vitriol (by volume) could be felt in round one, especially from folks whose favorite song got eliminated first.
Related, there were many promotional singles that got cut early. This was the first indication that a song with anyone else would not survive, but not all promo singles are treated equally. Every winner of this annual bracket has been a promo single from one of Grande’s studio albums—all without features. Take “Problem,” arguably thee song that put Ariana’s music career on the map. From her sophomore album My Everything, the track is now 11 years old, and features Iggy Azalea, who has let’s say fallen out of fashion in the pop world. “Problem” was beaten fairly decisively by “Obvious,” a solo deep cut from 2020’s Positions. Even “Thank U, Next,” which features one of Grande’s most notable music videos, a star-studded parody of Mean Girls, was not safe from the “Goodnight n Go” hive, who took over two-thirds of the vote.
Though there are still many rounds ahead, a lot began to coalesce in Round 2. Eternal Sunshine pulled ahead with nine remaining songs (out of the 17 seeded originally) still on the bracket. Distantly behind that was Positions, and that success turned out not to last much longer. Every non-album single was eliminated completely, marking the highest category to be eliminated so quickly (15 songs in two rounds). On that note, only one song featuring a person of color made it through. The deep cut “Safety Net,” from Positions featuring Ty Dolla $ign was the final song defended against racism.
Accusations of anti-black prejudice have flown since, well, the start of Ariana Grande’s career. Ari is very much in an unwinnable situation on this topic (see: white pop stars blackfishing); questioning her fans, though, seems fair game—are they racist? Generally speaking, the stan space is not friendly to non-white artists. Through my research I found one tweet that seemed outwardly racially prejudiced: ”white power winning as it should,” someone proclaimed about “Into You” by Troye Sivan featuring Grande defeating “Monopoly,” which is an Ari song featuring Victoria Monét. The user who made this comment had a profile picture of a person with dark skin, so I believe there is sarcasm at play. That said, racism isn’t only measured by the public accounts that actually tweet their thoughts. The numbers in this year’s bracket didn’t paint an optimistic picture; 59% of all songs with Black artists lost in Round 1 and all but one of the other collabs with people of color lost in Round 2. It should come as no surprise that “Safety Net” lost in Round 3.
I found many instances of folks calling out racism when a song with a person of color was losing—the loudest voices wanted better for the features with Black artists that couldn’t get out of the preliminary rounds of the bracket. Three of the closest Round 1 contests included people of color, though in the second round, collabs participated in all three of the widest margins (two with The Weeknd), meaning that they all lost in landslides.
At this point I was too curious and got lost in the data. It’s difficult to argue there was targeted fan prejudice considering that no collabs made it past Round 3 regardless of who was credited with Ariana. And half of the accusations I found weren’t even toward matchups that had an artist of color attached. Maybe that one angry person who reacted to “You Don’t Know Me” losing to “Imperfect for You” (neither of which actually have features) by claiming, “yall don’t like #black things, idk why i was surprised,” was referring to the classic hip hop samples from the Jungle Brothers and … Beastie Boys? Maybe, more earnestly, they are a fan of Harmony Samuels, who produced the track as well as much of Grande’s debut and sophomore albums.
Sometimes I found the logic if I dug deeper. I wanted to laugh at the idea that people misunderstood the point of “My Hair,” which on the surface is about letting someone touch her hair. If we’re talking about Black culture, then this is the opposite of common wisdom. It smacks of the historical prejudice of exoticism, which brings us back to devaluation and ownership of foreign bodies and boom, slavery. “this is an anti-black movement,” one fan declared.
Looking more closely at the lyrics of “My Hair,” Grande sings about becoming comfortable enough to let her hair down, so to speak. She discusses intimacy after consent, the vulnerable moment of letting someone inside your walls. Ari paints a literal image, but it has a double-entendre of deep proportions for women of color. This track may be important to Black fans specifically due to how succinctly the message resonates to their experience. And so it became clear to me that a large number of fans were probably screaming ‘racism’ into the void simply because they felt that their selection had been disrespected. This is a perennial joke, and though the tone was difficult to comprehend out of context in my bird app 3, I came around to it.
“the whole time i forgot the real enemy is ntltc,” a fan ominously noted in Round 3, referencing the beloved lead single from Sweetener, “No Tears Left to Cry.” It’s easy to see its past success and assume that it’s in everyone’s top 3 but once again, the monolith crumbles under the microscope. Many multi-year voters resent the popularity of “NTLTC,” some because it simply isn’t one of their favorites and some because they recognize it as a juggernaut of a competitor in the bracket. It has made it up to or beyond the semi-finals every single year since 2019. The only song that holds more power in the @ArianaToday annual bracket is “God Is a Woman,” which defeated “NTLTC” in the 2018 Quarterfinals. In 2025, an astute voter commented on the very first pairing in the bracket, “oh yall are tired of the same shit every year loll 😭😭😭😭”–you could accurately say that “God Is a Woman” was the first song to be eliminated this year, at the hands of “NTLTC.”
There was a marked shift in the energy for Round 3; the sore loser mentality never truly goes away but greater factions began to form complaining that the matchups were becoming challenging. The fat was quickly trimmed in the previous two rounds and the caliber of song has increased exponentially. Already, fans were making difficult decisions.
That said, one segment of Ariana’s discography was consistently maligned and that was the Wicked film soundtracks. “am i the only one that thinks the wicked songs shouldn’t be here,” someone noted over the battle between “For Good” and “Needy.” Though they were not eliminated as quickly as, say, the Christmas & Chill EP, more hate was shown for the Wicked songs in this bracket than anything else. (It was a low bar; Christmas & Chill only had one song seeded.) A Spanish-speaking fan expressed their radical opinion (through an awkward auto-translation): “The one who votes wonderful deserves the electric chair”
I decided early on that every seed should be treated equally, meaning that if the song itself is excellent, not much else matters to me. So yeah, I voted for “Defying Gravity” in three rounds. Objectively, that song is better than “I Don’t Care” and “Don’t Call Me Angel,” and that’s coming from a huge fan of the latter, an original single with Miley Cyrus and Lana del Rey that appeared in the Charlie’s Angels reboot. (I did find the third round a lot harder against “Everytime,” but unfortunately it’s not a literal showstopper. Arianators disagreed!)
I’m sure most of you reading are thinking the same thing that many folks were explicitly commenting: Glinda’s part of “Defying Gravity” is so small, and if anyone got to claim the song, it would be Cynthia Erivo, not Ariana. My retort: I didn’t make the bracket! I play by my own rules and the only rule was to vote for the song I liked more. The same goes for “No One Mourns the Wicked”—and you can’t argue that that’s not Ari’s song. This is the opening number of the musical and she pulls off operatic runs like a hot knife through butter. In my mind, it crushed “Hampstead” in Round 1 by a landslide. “why is so many people mad cus a masterpiece like hampstead end w no one mourns the chopped???” As you can tell, I was once again not in the majority, and Arianators kept the Eternal Sunshine (Deluxe) track alive until Round 3 when it met the unstoppable force that is “NTLTC.”
All the while, “Past Life” soared under the radar. Or flew in the face of its opponents, depending on your perspective. By the fourth round, this 8-month-old song had struck a nerve. “past life is good but i need y’all to be so fr because ain’t no bitch done ever started off they DEBUT album with a track like honeymoon avenue.” “not yall disrespecting the mother of all her songs, her iconic bio, and easily one of her best songs honeymoon avenue.” Some diehards, like these two, were outraged. Indeed, “Honeymoon Avenue” is the very start to her very first solo studio album, and the longest fans of her music career hold a soft spot for it. They could not overpower the “Past Life” hive.
The hive itself however was mighty but small. Every round earned renewed criticism on the song’s complete lack of popularity and relatively low streaming numbers. “When past lives becomes the song of the year, how are y’all going to justify it being the least streamed song from Eternal Sunshine,” a fan complained in Round 4. I looked into it and not only is that a true fact, data from multiple platforms corroborates it. “Past Life” is Ariana Grande’s 129th most popular Spotify track as of this writing with 82.6M listens. On YouTube, there is only one video of the full song and it’s 187th among her other videos. That comment was made during the “Honeymoon Avenue” matchup, which stands at 69th (228.5M spins) on Spotify and 129th at its highest rank on YouTube (out of three versions). The data adds up, point taken.
Then, as “We Can’t Be Friends” fell by a miniscule margin in Round 5: “it’s 50/50…… then why past life is publicly the least liked and streamed song of the deluxe when it’s clearly a masterpiece.” This was a fairer comparison; ”WCBF” appeared on the 2024 Eternal Sunshine, so too young to have had years to churn hundreds of millions of streams. But it’s also become one of Ariana’s instant classics and climbed all the way to her overall sixth most popular song on Spotify with 1.9 billion streams. It didn’t need a decade to marinate. The official music video is her 22nd most viewed on YouTube with 353B views and that’s just the most popular of eight versions. No wonder it won the bracket last year. To lose in the Quarterfinals this year was quite the upset.
Not that it requires explanation, but I nevertheless wanted to understand this phenomenon. How could “Past Life” beat “WCBF” despite being heroically outpaced in its streams? They have not been provided equal opportunities to success, marketing-wise. The sheer number of versions of “WCBF” available means that it is inherently more recognizable. It got the cinematic music video experience as the lead single from her most recent studio album. “Past Life” didn’t get any fanfare by contrast. No video, just the lyric visualizer to collect the YouTube cash. The deluxe release on the whole was lowkey, as it was admittedly a glorified b-sides collection. The fans were plugged in, especially at the prospect of six new tracks, but casual fans likely missed it entirely. So in the eight months since it came out, it makes sense that it hasn’t received the same level of love.
So then what’s happening in this bracket? Maybe 100% of “Past Life” enjoyers are on Twitter. Their enthusiasm converted me—the momentary instrumental pause in the final chorus makes me levitate. I spent some time with the deluxe in the summer by letting it play from start to finish, so I heard all of Eternal Sunshine, the bonus tracks, and usually all the a cappella renditions as well. I forgot which songs were new and therefore when I saw how low the numbers were, I was surprised. But let’s say the extra year (55 weeks) of streaming was somehow an outlier (were we better Ari fans in 2024?) and compare “Past Life” to “Twilight Zone,” a fellow track from the deluxe edition. It was eliminated in the second round to “Eternal Sunshine,” this being a heartbreaking pairing so early—”Twilight Zone” ranks 59th on Grande’s Spotify chart. Higher than “Honeymoon Avenue.” If the bracket were seeded differently, would “Honeymoon Avenue” defeat “Twilight Zone”? We can only speculate and enjoy the thrill of higher risks in later rounds.
The locals have scattered. Or at least, the idea of “locals” ruining the results of this contest has dissipated. Ironic, since the most damage could be done in the later stages. If the Twitter genpop found one of the four matchups in the Quarterfinals, I could see that leading to a La La Land/Moonlight-like outrage among Arianators, but the fear has gone. Perhaps they were satisfied with the eight remaining songs and would not have been mad if any of them won. Right.
The quarterfinalists were whittled down with precision: at the start of the round, only three albums were still represented. The stats between Sweetener and Eternal Sunshine were neck-and-neck with four and three songs remaining, respectively. Some fans celebrated the fall of Goliath when “Everytime” beat “NTLTC.” Some fans mourned the loss of two-time bracket winner “Into You,” which had defied the odds to keep Dangerous Woman in the mix until it met its match against “Eternal Sunshine.”
In terms of historic data, with its runner-up finish in 2024, “ES” is the most successful title track to be seeded in the annual bracket. Safe to say, the tune was on track to be just as successful as last year. In the first round, it clobbered “Six Thirty” by a stunning 83%-17% margin. As I mentioned, it took out “Twilight Zone” in the second round, which had to have tortured at least a few newgens (wink). Then in Round 3, it was “Eternal Sunshine” that knocked out “Safety Net,” which should bring some comfort since it was eliminated by a universally loved song (the racism conversation notwithstanding). The following matchup was again the biggest blowout of the round, where it walloped “Tattooed Heart” from Grande’s debut 70%-30%. With the additional victory over “Into You,” “Eternal Sunshine” seemed invincible.
The other semifinalists included “Everytime,” “Goodnight n Go,” and the meteoric “Past Life.” This is the second time that both Sweetener songs have made it to this point: “Everytime” in 2021 and “Goodnight n Go” in 2019. And after this round, this remained their best record, much to the chagrin of supporters. When “Everytime” fell to “ES,” one fan tweeted, “recency bias is actually eating y’all alive…….” The responses were varied, with many in agreement:
“eternal sunshine is her most overrated non single.”
“Past Life” came up in the thread as well:
“past life over into u cuz wdym past life is better than the bible?????”
“Cause past life over Gng????????”
And then there were the dissenters who pulled no punches:
“nostalgia is eating you alive, every time [sic] is not the song yall make it out to be.”
“you have continuously proven to me that you have NO taste… omg.”
“well no baby i’m sorry eternal sunshine is better but i’ll always love everytime.”
“Past Life” was on a generational run. After taking down “Goodnight n Go,” the win felt inevitable. Not that “Goodnight n Go” was bulletproof competition; every round someone would make a complaint along the lines of: “losing to a cover… bffr.” As previously discussed, I treat all songs equally and I also love the Imogen Heap version so I ended up voting for it three times. This didn’t come up with “Raindrops (An Angel Cried),” but also it was defeated soundly in Round 1 77%-23% by “Don’t Wanna Break Up Again” of Eternal Sunshine fame. I was part of the majority on that one, “Raindrops” is literally half a song, or specifically it’s half (less, really) of the Four Seasons song “An Angel Cried.” I will concede that, not counting the Wicked songs, these are the only two covers from Ariana Grande’s studio albums, and both are from Sweetener, if that says anything. Perhaps the association with the beloved 2018 record earned “Goodnight n Go” its place in the Semifinals. I saluted it when it fell out of the bracket.
Can “Past Life” go all the way? It won by less than a percentage point in the Quarterfinals, which I couldn’t even see in the results. On my app, it said both songs ended with 50%. This contest received 14799 votes, the most in total than any other matchup up to this point. The losing song in question was “We Can’t Be Friends,” the reigning champion. A newcomer takes down the titleholder. Was it luck or was it malfeasance?
Every round has its outliers, but they can be explained. Round 1 was the most inconsistent; “Don’t Call Me Angel” vs “Blazed” raked in 13819 votes, 130% times the average and 3590 over the median. But it was also a 50%-50% race, and calls for votes were happening aggressively on both sides. In Round 2, the fierce supporters of “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored” could not overcome the ES Deluxe stans who pushed “Hampstead” to the win with 57% of the vote, 126% times the average and 2497 votes above the median. Though not even among the top five closest margins in that round, it was still a tough battle.
Then, every single round after that, “Past Life” appeared in the matchup with the most votes. The margin varied, but the pattern was noticeable. But one pattern does not a conspiracy make. Could the “Past Life” hive truly be agile enough to come in when needed? The highest margin of difference was in Round 4, where 14799 votes came through for the pairing “Past Life” and “We Can’t Be Friends.” That was 122% times the round’s average and 3384 votes above the median. Though not as severe of a difference as with “DCMA” vs “Blazed” in Round 1, this pairing was also a 50%-50% matchup that had fans torn 4.
“why are people forcing past life so much? its not better than we can’t be friends and its definitely not better than gng. there is something shady going on, i smell bots and fraud.” Whether or not there was adequate evidence, Arianators were ready with accusations of fake votes. When one fan hinted at their suspicion saying, “Past life the least streamed song on ES somehow ended the global number one hit wcbf … something not adding up #fraudulence,” another replied, “wake that tea up bby the bots are ruining this we cant be friends deserved that win.”
I’ll put it plainly, I don’t believe there were bots. The margins were so close that reckless botting5 should have been noticeable in at least one of the matchups, but nothing was so off the charts that it stood out. Instead, I wonder if there was a coalition of (rule-abiding) Eternal Sunshine (Deluxe) fans who pivoted midway through the competition. In Round 1, “Hampstead”’s matchup racked up 12776 votes, 120% over average and 2547 votes over the median. It was against “No One Mourns the Wicked,” and given the disdain for Wicked in the bracket, the results were a cruel ratio of 71%-29%. Was the volume of votes necessary to crush a song that most Arianators disqualified on their own terms anyway?
Then the “BUWYG,IB” incident came in Round 2. The voting count was the highest of the round, setting “Hampstead” up for, well, something. Its performance in the following round was the only thing I couldn’t explain as it was so uneventful; “Eternal Sunshine” was the victor of the most-voted pairing (though Round 3 also had one of the lowest average total votes per matchup, so all this could mean nothing). If the goal was to send “Hampstead” all the way, the ES Deluxe contingent sobered up quick when “Hampstead” faced “No Tears Left To Cry” in Round 4. The loss was humane at a 64%-36% margin but it was not quiet or dignified; a particularly unhinged tweet in celebration of “NTLTC” involved Grande’s dog: “Toulouse yelled “i have an erection” but she heard “pop perfection” and just went with it.”
Suddenly “Past Life” started showing up. Not in outrageous numbers, it was more like unlikely numbers. There had been “PL” truthers since the very beginning but now the track was setting records. The highest number of votes every round after “Hampstead” was eliminated. These were not new users suddenly joining the competition; the “Past Life” hive was actually the “Hampstead” hive with a new purpose.
Regardless of how they got there, “Eternal Sunshine” and “Past Life” were our finalists. This poll had the longest voting period of the entire competition, giving everyone two days to make their choice. Unsurprisingly, it received the most votes overall, a cool 15196. I checked the results regularly and it was so close that I felt true tension in my body for the full 48 hours. And this is where I lost confidence in all my ideas and theories about Twitter Arianators.
I placed my vote early, when only around 1100 people had voted. The songs were in a dead heat with 50% each. “in the finals but the streams aren’t matching so what’s the tea,” a fan commented. Curiously, this has been an accusation leveled at both of the finalists, so it’s not immediately obvious which song they voted for. (“eternal sunshine was a phenomenal album but for both songs in the finals to be from that album, is absurd. newer fans ruin this shit every year i swear,” was a common sentiment.) But if the previous commenter was attuned to the streaming numbers, they would have sided with “Eternal Sunshine.” We know “Past Life” has some of Ariana’s worst streaming performance, so the bar is low, but “ES” does stack up to the challenge: four versions are on Spotify (the highest placed at 56th in popularity [290M streams]) and of three videos on Ari’s YouTube, the most popular is ranked 87th (39M views)—exactly a hundred paces above “Past Life” with a measly 10M views.
So who truly was the favorite in the race? Just two and a half hours later, the balance had shifted: “Eternal Sunshine” was now winning with 51% of 3080 votes. Another two and a half hours passed, and the percentage remained the same despite an additional 1783 votes. At the next interval, the pattern repeated; “Past Life” was hanging onto 49% of the now 5929 votes that had been cast. The voting period still had over 39 hours left. I had to sleep.
As a fan of both songs myself, I knew I was not going to be disappointed in the results. The live studio version of “Eternal Sunshine” absolutely takes my breath away. Grande fills the space with a warmth not felt on the album track, especially on the second chorus. I also love the little stab of percussion halfway through the performance from the drummer’s electro pad. But I still had invested my vote in “Past Life.” Call it recency bias if you want, but I had truly fallen in love with the song this year…not that I could have discovered it any earlier. Not to mention, it was the champion of both of my brackets, so I was invested in #winning the invisible yet invaluable prize known as bragging rights.
I completed a bracket like you would for March Madness college basketball playoffs, where early eliminations had the opportunity to handicap my chances to get the winner correct. It did better than it should have, in terms of wins and losses, but by the Semifinals I only had one dog in the race. “My Way” and “Breathin” were my Semifinalists, “POV” my runner-up, and “Past Life” went all the way to the top. So that became my only hope.
I also kept a living bracket, joining the polls every round regardless of my prior success. I rode the wave with “Past Life” and was elated that I got at least one in the Final Four. The results of the Semifinals were my all-time, round-by-round best at a perfect 100% (my odds were essentially 50/50, twice). However, my best round between both of my brackets was in fact back in Round 2. Luck was on my side—half of the board in my complete bracket had been eliminated but I still got 15 of the remaining 16 matchups correct (93%). On the other bracket, where every pairing was still fair game, I ended up getting 24 of 32 (75%). But who cares about any of this?
Throughout the duration of the Finals poll, tensions rose as the voting slowed. @buffys weighed in under the poll by declaring, “AND PAST LIFE WILL BE WINNING” just for an Arianator to disagree and accuse in the same breath: “gove [sic] us payola.” Not everyone was passionately on one side or the other. “Ariana’s best 2 song [sic] being here is just so right.” Some of my favorite unhinged demands for votes were preposterous proposals, and my favorite was, “I’LL SEND POLE AND HOLE TO EVERYONE WHO VOTES FOR ETERNAL SUNSHINE.” On the other side, there was, “VOTE FOR PAST LIFE + I NEED A SUGAR DADDY” with many replies of “DM me” from profiles with white-haired men. The smoothest was, “Are you interested in being my baby and get spoiled financially?” (“Be My Baby” is from My Everything.)
The entire time, the votes remained in the same proportion, 51% “Eternal Sunshine” and 49% “Past Life.” With just 14 minutes on the clock someone threatened, “No guys I hate you. I’m adding bots to make past life win.” But if they did follow through on that, it didn’t work. “Eternal Sunshine” was the narrow victor, earning the title of the Arianators’ Favorite Ariana Grande Song 2025.
Props to @ArianaToday for the effort they put in every year to administer this contest. Naturally, the songs are slightly different each year, given any new releases, but the seeding is very impressive—the studio albums and features worked out round to round perfectly to avoid too many blowouts and landslides. They were also prompt when the polls ended at tweeting the next round with a fair amount of time to fill it out. There’s something to say about years of experience, but this being my first bracket, this was my first chance to give my compliments.
I had to concede defeat in my brackets, but it was with my head held high. The living bracket may have lost in the Finals, but was 100% successful in the Semis and 75% in the Quarters. And if the worst thing to come out of this was losing a meaningless game, I still got to analyze music that I already enjoyed. Of course nothing really came of most of my aforementioned curiosity among special categories. Most categories were eliminated proportionately to the amount of songs eliminated, around 55% on average every round. Some factors are traceable, others simply left up to the whims of the fans. For example, promotional singles were destined to be eliminated because so many of them were features, not just album tracks. People don’t value The Weeknd more than other features, either. If anything, ballads were eliminated a little quicker proportionate to how many were seeded in the bracket overall.
Considering the bracket as a whole, Eternal Sunshine and the Deluxe are well-loved. Not only did it dominate this year, it also did so in last year’s bracket just seven or so months after its release. The last time an album won the bracket and occupied three of the spots in the Semifinals in the year of its release was, you guessed it, Sweetener in 2018. Will Eternal Sunshine have the same legacy?
At this point, I do have to wonder—is Ariana Grande’s ballooning fame thanks to Wicked and her re-entry into the film industry attracting (gulp) newgens? I love Eternal Sunshine a great deal, and I would believe if it was as beloved as Sweetener, but I can’t shake the outside factors that could have seeped in. She’s everywhere and she is a bigger topic of conversation than ever before. Despite her literal pleas for folks to stop talking about her body, people have shifted from hating her for getting tanned and using different registers of her voice to now suddenly caring (/s) that she’s tiny. It’s not all good press, as it never is, but her prevalence is undeniable, and perhaps that has seeped into the fandom, waking people up to her newest music.
But we’re also talking about a community that has opted into this bracket for upwards of ten years. The numbers have grown significantly—the total votes in the Finals has nearly tripled the votes received the first year the polls were hosted on Twitter (though it was officially the second annual Best Ari Song contest. Numbers from the first year have been lost to time). It will take a few years more to catch up to the numbers seen in 2020, when it saw over 22000 participants in the final poll, but the rise in participation has been steady. I can only imagine what the 2026 bracket will bring, especially since Ariana is most likely not going to make any new releases.
The concept of stanning is not new to me, but spending this much time with Arianators made me see them in a specific light as well. Compared to the emotional, petite character that they worship, Ariana Grande’s fans are simultaneously vicious and generous, reacting within each match as if being in the minority of the Twitter poll was the beginning of the apocalypse. In actuality, the fervor comes from a loyalty to Ari, along with some pent up rage from some other part of their life I’m sure. But it’s all love, deep, deep, deeeeep down. With that, I would like to conclude with some of the most unhinged comments I saw made during this contest. I’ll see you all in December.
- Before I was 16, I was attached to my iPod during travel. Then when I could drive, my car didn’t have an aux port and that’s why I’m still into CDs. Also because my car still does not have an aux port. It’s the same car. It is 20 years old. ↩︎
- I have not forgotten about Swifties. And I won’t get into it. Capitalism is not art! ↩︎
- I live in a reality where E*** M*** does not exist. ↩︎
- All 50/50 results, by round. Bold = winner.
1. Don’t Call Me Angel vs Blazed
2. Obvious vs Greedy
2. My Hair vs Bad Idea
5/QF. Past Life v We Can’t Be Friends ↩︎ - ‘Botting’ is a slang term for setting up automated accounts (bots) that perform actions on Twitter. The frequency can be every time a trigger occurs, for example, if a user tweets a specific hashtag, or for as long as they are programmed, so potentially infinitely. I don’t have a lot of programming knowledge but in this context ‘botting’ implies that votes are being made by fake users somehow. There are ways to create new users with lines of code so maybe they can set each one up to vote for a specific poll. Maybe it’s possible to hack the poll itself and influence the winner. However it is accomplished, the point is that I do think it’s possible to impose an influence on the contest via bots. But I don’t necessarily think that it happened in the 2025 bracket. ↩︎
Further sources and data can be found here.
Sawdust & Gin 